The term Tankie has a clear definition that Cowbee likes to ignore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof.
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Why though? There’s nothing communist about the Russian federation at all.
Tell that to a tankie.
But there is the authoritarian part. They love to lick the boot.
Soviet Union was “communist”, and it used very authoritarian methods. Tankies have worked a lot in order to justify USSR’s authoritarianism and grave inequality. The Russia is directly continuing the same methods, and therefore all the “justification” applies to the Russia as well.
Tankies were okay with those means in 1960’s, and they are okay with the same means in 2020’s. Regardless of the underlying economic system.
Like saying the Nazis were actually socialists. But nominally the Russian Federation is theoretically a democracy. A democracy that is an oligarchy and kleptocracy in which the same candidate will always win, the opposition is mostly token, and is in fact an authoritarian dictatorship.